:: Balbir Punj

Red signal for democracy

Balbir K. Punj

May.8 : Faced with imminent rout in the current Lok Sabha polls, the Congress has once again extended an olive branch to the Left with which it had parted company only a year ago on a bitter note. The move surely smacks of rank opportunism on the part of the beleaguered Congress. But it also completely ignores the threats that the Left’s co-option in the power structure at the Centre poses to Indian democracy, particularly in the context of recent developments in Nepal.

It is an open secret that the Left is busy creating a "red corridor" between Pashupatinath in Nepal to Tirupati in south India, passing through the Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The Left leadership, both in Nepal as well as India, not only share a fascist ideology but also have common training ground in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Former Prime Minister of Nepal Pushpa Kamal Dahal "Prachanda" and bulk of the CPI(M) leadership honed their cloak and dagger skills at this university which was set up by Dr Narul Hasan (education minister in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet), a former card-holder, with this very objective in mind.

While a section of Communists, under the nomenclature of Naxalites and Maoists, wages an underground war against the civil society and the state, various Leftist formulations work as their overground face, often under the garb of political parties or masquerading as human rights groups. While the violent "red groups" try to overwhelm the system from outside by targeting security forces and civil society, the rest work to wreck the democratic system from within. Though normally they work in tandem, complimenting and supplementing each other, occasionally they do have violent clashes because violence is central to their ideology. Hence the occasional clashes between the CPI(M) and Naxal cadres.

The tiger, it is said, does not change its spots. Nor do the Marxists. Even in India, after several decades of Marxists pretending to accept the parliamentary path, the blatant attempts of Marxists in West Bengal and Kerala, the two states where they are heading the state government, to entrench themselves and be a parallel administration enforcing its own "law and order", murdering opponents and even extorting money are well documented.

In Kerala, for instance, courts have convicted Marxist cadres in several cases of murders, one of the latest being the life sentence for some Marxist leaders for the daylight murder of a teacher in the class itself. In West Bengal, even as the election process is on, Trinamul Congress’ leader Prasanta Mondal was killed by the Marxists. The law and order situation in both the states where the Marxists rule is only a shade better than in the Naxal-controlled areas in eastern India where they have established a parallel administration.

Once again Nepal is on the edge, and much depends on the other political forces — how far they see through the Marxist game and unite to oppose Mr Prachanda’s agenda of one-party takeover of the country. The net result of what Mr Prachanda has done is an attempt to take over Nepal and turn it into a Communist country that does not tolerate any political opposition. His game-plan is now unfolding: create a crisis, wreck the peace agreement behind which all the political forces had ranged, isolate other political forces by raising the anti-India bogey, weaken the Army and line up own cadre for a final assault on the power structure.

The timing is also important. Mr Prachanda has struck when India is going through an election in which the Communists are bent on creating confusion in a fractured polity. While trying to prop up a hotch-potch Third Front, they will also try to seize power through the backdoor with the help of the Congress, just as they have always done. It must be understood that the Marxists in Nepal and a good part of the Left in India are merely extensions of Communist China’s imperialist designs.

In the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the Communist were holding that backdoor power as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has admitted. Surprisingly, the same Dr Singh, who bemoaned his "slavery" to the Left earlier, is now saying he is not averse to a deal with the Left after the election results. That means the danger of a Communist backdoor manipulation of the system is very much present in India. And this is happening when Nepal is critically poised between a Communist takeover and democracy, and Pakistan is rocked by forces of extremism.

The context also lends significance to the alliance between the Communists and the Muslim ultra-orthodoxy in this country. This alliance was on display in West Bengal when the two together ensured that Bangladeshi dissident writer Taslima Nasreen was ousted from Kolkata. This alliance became the most prominent election issue in Kerala when the Marxists joined forces with the extremist Islamic force, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and its extremist leader Abdul Nasser Madani.

The alliance was so alarming that even some Left parties were upset. Despite that, the Marxists pushed on, particularly the state party secretary Pinrayi Vijayan and the party’s Politburo gave him full support. It would be a sad day if non-Communist political parties, especially the Congress and its allies (or whatever is left of them), fail to see the writing on the wall or read what the converging forces of communism and jihadi extremism, both committed to violence and world domination, are revealing.

In the ’50s and ’60s the history of eastern Europe revealed how Marxists push democratic forces towards self-destruction by luring them with "united front" tactics before eliminating them one by one. A decisive stage has come in the political destiny of our sub-continent — Pakistan wobbles under extremist pressure, Marxists have joined the battle in Nepal for an eventual takeover and Bangladesh is sitting on a volcano — as Indian electorate makes its choice with analysts fearing an unstable government.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbk@gmail.com